The Poems Man
Look, look, she cried, the poems man,
running across the frail bridge
of her innocence. Into what house
will she go ? Into what guilt will
that bridge lead ? I
the man she called out at
and she, hardly twelve
meet in the middle, she going
her way; I coming from mine:
the middle where we meet
is not the place to stop.

( Selected Poems, 1997 )

The child’s shout on recognising Guyana’s national poet as ‘the poems man’ carries a certain respectful awe, but at the same time it is a good-natured, childish jibe aimed at a familiar, tall, raw-boned figure whose eccentric craft is the making of poems. In adopting the child’s description of him for his poem’s title, Carter, with gently sardonic humour, accepts his implied kinship with other familiar, even lumpen, urban figures: fisherman, cartman, coconut man, garbage man, obeah man, milkman. That acceptance is characteristic of both the poetry and the man. Martin Carter remains a ‘people’s poet’, always personally involved in the human condition about which he wrote. Some of his poems have a resonance for us today that can be quite startling:

Those miseries I know you cultivate
are mine as well as yours, or do you think
the impartial bullock cares whose land is
ploughed?
(‘After one year’ Poems of Succession, 1977)

In a yawning gun world I
am more a criminal than any of them.
(‘Inventor’ Poems of Affinity, 1980)

Whatever we are, let us never forget to wrap
a tender hand upon the all-seeing brow of a
child.
The longer we take to do so, the longer will
nature divide.
(‘On a pavement’ Poems of succession)

His poetry suggests a natural affinity with people in the community, a quality that has made Carter pre-eminently the poet of ordinary, urban people: a public poet in the finest sense. His poems tend to be short, their language economical and deceptively simple in their vernacular tone and rhythm. But they are meticulously shaped to challenge conventional ideas and to question accepted social behaviour. In ‘The Poems Man’, the poem comes to a sudden stop, ironically, with the line “the middle where we meet / is not the place to stop.” The reader is left, abruptly, to consider the implications of what appears, at first sight, to be obvious. the ‘middle’ cannot be a true stopping-point, merely an intersection. The poet and the girl are headed in opposite directions. But there is a nagging sense ( because the poem ends so abruptly ) that perhaps there ought to be a stopping-point : a point of genuine meeting between ‘rude citizen’ and public poet, between childish innocence and adult experience. This idea recurs in Carter’s poetry, sometimes with political implications.

In a small city at dusk

it is difficult to distinguish
bird from bat. Both fly fast :
one away from the dark
and one toward the dark.
The bird to nest in the tree.
The bat to a feast in its branches.

Stranger to each other they seek...
the same tree that grows out of the great soil.
And I know, even before I came to live here,
dusk did the same to bird and bat and does
the same to man.
(‘in a small city at dusk’ Poems of Succession)

Dusk is the time when sun and moon, travelling in opposite directions, intersect. A crossing, not a meeting point. Bat and bird do the same thing at dusk, following opposite impulses, moving in opposite directions, but seeking the same resting-place; “the same tree that grows out of the great soil”. It is hard to avoid the thought that the poem is hinting at a lack of meaningful communication - a genuine meeting-point - between the two major ethnic groups ( or political parties ) of the land, who, though sharing the same city, still live in opposed worlds, only meeting en passant like bat and bird, or like the ‘poems man’ and the young girl. The poem’s relevance is particularly striking today.

Martin Carter’s poetry is full of serious social, political and philosophical concern as well as with veiled warnings of the tragic consequences that will ensue if “...Men murder men, as men must murder men, / to build their shining governments of the damned. “ (‘After one year’ Poems of Succession) His work also reveals a burden of isolation, bitterness and even despair over the apparently hopeless condition of what he referred to (and we have come to recognise) as “my strangled city”. But what emerges out of the body of his work is his deeply humane concern with the life of ordinary people. This is the legacy of his work and his life as a poet and man among us : that our bitterness must be in proportion to our greatness of heart, and that by refusing to be more than simply humane human beings, we can never be in danger of becoming anything less.